7/30/10

Hey! I'm Jamielyn from I ♥ naptime w/chocolate sundaes!I’m so excited to be blog swapping with A Feathered Nest! I love coming to her blog. She has so many cute ideas, and all the pictures she takes are beautiful! Abby is so talented!

Today I'm going to share with you a few of my favorite projects. Click the links to find the tutorials...and please let me know if you have any questions on any of the projects. iheartnaptime@gmail.com

Back when I had Brooke, my DEAR, dear, dearest friend Pam sent a package of baby goodies and within her box of creations was a cute baby tag blanket. It's soft, chewy, and Brooke loves it! {love ya, Pamsies!}

Lately, Brooke is obsessed with the crunchy, plastic baby wipe packaging and I can't change her diaper without {carefully} hiding it from her. So I'm making her a *crunchy* tag blanket toy and now we'll have one of each! One for quiet times and one for her to be loud with! Perfect!

This little project was simple - no special measurements, just eyeballing. You can eyeball, right? So go grab some fabric scraps, some ribbon scraps, and join me!

***Note: you don't have to make yours 'quilt style' like I did. You can just use one big piece of fabric, but I happened to like the busy fabrics together like this to add interest.Now cut six squares of random pieces - five rectangles cut in half. I believe mine were 4 x 7 and then I cut them in half.

I also played with various colors of

trim on the square pieces and loved it! You'll want to sew those onto the squares before you piece them together.

Sew the squares together with right sides facing; press open

Then sew the rows together, right sides facing; press open.

Now I'm not a quilter, I don't have the nerves for it...and you can see why. Even though I measured everything, cut all of my squares perfectly square, they still didn't line up whilst sewing them together. WHY??? I don't know. But who cares, right?! It's still darn cute. (plus, babies don't care.)

Then you square up your lines with your rotary cutter & ruler after your pieces are all stitched together.

Now pin on your ribbons. Get creative, colorful, and have fun! Velvet textures are great, too, but I couldn't find any.

Now on to the crunchy part. This is a piece of the baby wipes packaging I cut up - I probably could have done a better job at getting a larger piece, but it isn't going to matter. The thing will crunch! But because it's smaller than my top and bottom piece, I'm going to sew it onto the wrong side of my fabric before I do anything else so it will stay put.

There! Now it's secure and not going to go anywhere. If you don't want this big of a piece, do strips, circles, or random patches on this bottom piece. That way you'll still get crunch without it being SO crunchy!

Next, you should baste your ribbons all the way around before you stitch the thing shut like I did, that way you can remove your pins. You don't want to turn this right-side-out with pins in it. {durh...wish I would have thought of that sooner...}

Then put right sides together, sew around leaving about 6 -8 inches opening in the side. Clip your corners and trim up the trimmin's - you know the drill.

Turn your fabric right-side-out; press flat.

Now you can put that last little ribbon in place while tucking the hole back into place.

Sew close to the edge all the way around, securing the opening and finishing the piece.

And that's it! Now go grab yourself a cute little baby and let 'em barf all over your hard work!

Brooke LOVES this, by the way!!! I even think it exceeded her low expectations. haha.

7/13/10

You can imagine my joy when I received not one, but TWO yummy awards today after the day I've had!!! {see bloody mess below}

Precious Honey said the nicest things here....and Precious Amy did over here. Thanks, girls, I truly don't deserve all this...but I'LL TAKE IT!! Thanks for making my rough day sunshinier!

And this....oh, well it's one of the occupational hazards of doing the dishes. Apparently I don't know my own strength because I busted a vase whilst cleaning it...going down and around over a razor sharp edge...and it dug into my flesh going ALL THE WAY TO THE BONE! {gasp} It was one of those slow-motion things and I knew when I saw how deep it was...and then seeing bone...that I'd definitely be taking a break to go get stitched up. Awesome. The adorable Kristine took my kiddies and I drove myself to the Dr. {love her!}

All better now - and I don't have to do dishes for a while! YESS! {but between you and me, I could have done it in a less-painful-less-bloody sort of way.}

I was well enough to capture one shot of my baby girl...FIVE MONTHS OLD NOW. Can you believe it?! I'm in denial - but she's pretty scrumptious nevertheless her old age.

7/12/10

Can I tell you how much I LOVE these jars?! My girl, Elizabeth, told me about this great idea and I knew it was one I could do! She saw it somewhere and passed the idea on to me, which I took and did my own thing with it. {'cause I'm a tweaker!} Each task is given a pom pom value - do that job and get that many pom pom puffy balls! Simple! My kids know that every day they're required to do their room and one other big task - the rest is up to them.

I don't follow through with actual job "charts" so this is good for me. They're great, but I'm more inclined to follow something like this rather than rotating a job chart. AND....this way my kids can come up with random things to do, knowing they'll be rewarded for even the little things.

So when they come to me and say, "I'm bored", they can refer to the chart on the fridge for something to do. When they say, "I wanna play the DS...I wanna pack of gum...I wanna play on the computer..." then it's going to cost them. They've quickly found that they really don't want to waste their puff balls since it was so hard to earn them. HA! That's the grand beauty of this idea!!!

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{Abby} @ A Feathered Nest

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A Little About Me...

Living in Sunny Arizona, I stay at home, take care of kids, and try to stay sane. I love chocolate, good movies, being active, and of course, my family. I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and I work in the Primary as the Primary Chorister. {and I can't sing....so....it gets awkward....}